Magnificent Hummingbird

[Gary Hamilton]

Magnificent Hummingbird--Costa Rica

Canon 1D MK IV
Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS
ISO 320
ss 1/200
f/11

four flash setup, artificial background

[laurie golden]

Gary,

Good composition, great fanned tail, wing position and very sharp. Can't get any better.

[Nick Palmieri]

Very nice, like the BG and the bird looks sharp. Crop looks good.

[Greg Oakley]

Beautiful colours, nice and sharp - a beauty!
Cheers Greg

[Joe Senzatimore]

Frozen action is what draws me to this one. Love the BG and comp. Might lighten the head just a bit.

[Greg Basco]

Looks great, Gary. I'll look forward to seeing a woodstar at this flower :-)

Cheers,
Greg

[Satish Ranadive]

Gary:
Magnificent image of magnificent Hummingbird.
Love the pose,beautiful colors,flowers and BG.

Regards,
Satish.

[Gary Hamilton]

Thanks for all of your kind words. Photographing hummingbirds at setups is a blast. I will take a crack at lightening the throat a bit. The head is naturally pretty dark but I may be able to tease out some of the blue-ish/turquoise colors of the throat.

Greg: I am still going thru images but I don't think I got the woodstar on this flower. I will keep looking.

[dankearl]

Very nice hummingbird photo, the flower and bird look very great.
The only thing that puzzles me is why you would go to Costa Rica and use an artificial background?
It seem like the point of going to Costa Rica is to photograph hummingbirds in natural surroundings?

[Gary Hamilton]

Here is a re-post with a bit more blue in the throat and lightened a bit overall.

Good question, Dan. The best answer I can come up with is that when doing setups on dark, cloudy and/or rainy days in Costa Rica, having a flash-lit artificial background is needed or else your background just goes dark.

[Greg Basco]

That's right, Gary. In fact, even on sunny days when theoretically there would be sufficient light to pull off fast shutter speeds, the quality of the light is usually too harsh. This is the reason that this method has become the preferred one for consistently obtaining super sharp photos with pleasing lighting of tropical hummingbirds.

Cheers,
Greg